By: Lauren Atherton
With spring and summer quickly approaching, what better way to celebrate than with food and wine! I have found the perfect recipe to mix some of my favorite wines with the light, airy taste of the sea. These are perfect for those warm spring and summer nights! For this meal, I wanted to incorporate a very summery feel since summer is quickly approaching Stillwater. When I think of summer, I think of two things besides gorgeous weather: seafood and wine. I took a wine tasting class where we learned about pairing wine with food and what wines taste like, and I feel like a real connoisseur. JUST KIDDING!! But I did learn that a lighter wine, such as Moscato or Chardonnay, tastes so delicious with seafood, such as fish, lobster, crab and shrimp. I was also concerned with keeping the meal fairly low calorie, since its wedding season, and seafood makes eating low calorie so easy. I am always nervous when it comes to cooking seafood because the coloring is so different from that of meat, so I did a LOT of research about easy ways to cook seafood. I decided to start with a simple fish and veggie combo that can be made in the oven in very little time. My fiancé and I went to Walmart and got two pieces of salmon, asparagus, lemon, onions and a variety of lemon and placed a couple slices on top of the salmon. Once the oven had heated up to 400, we placed the foil packets into the oven for around 25 minutes. To
make sure that the salmon is done, I searched Google for a picture to make sure the coloring looked okay. To me, the color of the salmon should be a bright pink, and the asparagus should be slightly mushy. I like my asparagus a little less done, so I took my asparagus out a little bit early.
We wanted to keep the side simple and low carb, so we went with multi- grain rice medley packets. These are super easy; you stick them in the microwave for about a minute and a half, and you can get them in two packs at Walmart for about two dollars. One pack has 230 calories, so it doesn’t break the daily calorie count, which is perfect for swimsuit season. Wine is my FAVORITE part of this meal. We tried so many different kinds of wine in class, but my favorites were always the white wines. They are lighter, sweeter and all around better in my opinion. The great thing about wine is that you can find really great wine for a low cost! The wine that I decided to pair with this meal was a Mocato d’Asti that we tasted in class, but another great option is Barefoot moscato that you can find at any liquor store here in town, and its only $8! Another good wine to pair with this meal would be Chardonnay. It is light, just the like moscato, but it has different flavors associated with it and is much more dry than the moscato. You really can’t go wrong with a white wine for this meal!
The set up for cooking this was BEYOND easy. We pre-heated the oven to 400 degrees and put the asparagus and salmon into tin foil with garlic powder and olive oil and fresh thyme. We cut the onion and spices main of our for the course meal.
